I'm Lana Ulrich, in-house counsel for the National Constitution Center, and welcome

to We The People, a weekly show of constitutional debate.

Jeffrey Rosen is away this week. The Constitution Center is a nonpartisan nonprofit

chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the

Constitution among the American people. Today in our special Civil War and

Reconstruction series we uncover the life of Harriet Robinson Scott, the wife and

co-plaintiff of Dred Scott in the infamous case Dred Scott versus Sanford.

It was in this case that the Supreme Court held that African Americans were not citizens

of the United States and couldn't sue in court.

The divisive case greatly influenced the outcome of the next

presidential election and the South's eventual secession from the Union leading to the

Civil War. Much is known about the outcome of the case itself, but little attention has been devoted to the actual people who brought this case before the court, Harriet Scott and her husband.

Joining us today to discuss Mrs. Dred Scott, are two leading Civil War historians.

Leah Vanderbilt is the Josephine R. Witt chair at the University of Iowa College of Law.

In 2011, she was the Guggenheim Fellow in Constitutional Studies.

She is the author of Mrs. Dread Scott, a life on slavery's frontier, a one-of-a-kind biography of Harriet

Scott, as well as Redemption Songs suing for Freedom before Dread Scott.

Martha S Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor and Professor of History

at Johns Hopkins University.

Her newest book is Birthright Citizens, a history of race and rice in Antibellum America.

And she is also the author of All Bound Up Together, The Woman Question in African American Public

Culture from 1830 to 1900. She also appeared in the C-SPAN and National Constitution

...